One of the best things we've seen on Twitter over the past three weeks as Bradley Wiggins has headed towards Tour de France glory have been the short poems - 140 characters or less, naturally - tweeted by Le Tour en Franglais at the end of each stage. They've certainly brightened our evenings up, and we thought they deserved a wider audience, so with the creator's kind permission, here is the whole of the 2012 Tour de France in verse.

For now, sadly, the identity of the author must remain anonymous, not least in case the Academie Francaise, proud guardians of the French language, decide to dispatch Jean Reno to the land of les rosbifs to hunt down the perpetrator. Plenty of great works of literature have authors whose names are lost in the mist of time, however, and like all epic poems, this one starts, of course, with a prologue...